Denny's Customer Tries to Pay for Meal With Weed

Remember in the 2010 Senate elections when Nevada Republican hopeful Sue Lowden ran against Harry Reid with a unique take on solving the health care crisis? Her proposal for a chickens-for-check-ups barter system had patients swapping livestock for medical services. “Before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor,” she famously said in a local news interview.

Well, if exchanging good for goods and services works for a candidate in a US senate race, why not a hungry stoner from New York?

That was the logic motivating a local man last Saturday who found himself a little light in the wallet at the checkout counter of his Niagara Falls Denny’s (DENN) restaurant. When he didn’t have enough money to pay for his $9.91 take-out order, he offered the cashier a bag of marijuana instead.

Though details of the exact quantity or quality of his commodity haven’t been released, the trade seemed more than a fair -- especially considering he threw in a buck on top of it. In a strictly monetary sense, the greasy spoon would have certainly come out ahead on that one.

But the Denny’s worker didn’t go for the deal. And when he was refused, the customer took his bag around to other patrons dining at the restaurant to see if they might be up for a sale. Either he’s not a great salesman or everyone was already hooked up. It was 2am at a Denny’s after all, and that’s prime munchies time for the smoking set. Maybe he would have had better luck at White Castle.

The pothead gave up when the cashier called the police and he fled the restaurant for cover in the woods. The crack team of investigators at the Niagara Falls PD were provided his name by a fellow customer and have visited his home but he’s managed to elude them thus far. The hunt continues.

As far as criminal incidents at all-night diners go, Denny’s got off pretty easy. Over just a two-week period last summer, a string of 18 Waffle Houses in Georgia and Alabama were robbed at gunpoint. This could create a new argument that guns don’t hold up restaurants, flapjacks do.